The Birth of Shinigami
by newtypeshadow
Summary: How Duo Maxwell came to be Shinigami. *oneshot*


The Birth of Shinigami  
by Lady Tait  
  
Authors Note: This fic was written without my having seen a picture of Maxwell Church. Gomen if I've messed up in my description (its almost inevitable that I have). Just bear with me, okay?  
  
_word_ for emphasis  
  
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The church stood firmly in the center of the now demolished city. It had materialized from nowhere, yet seemed impossible to miss. In the midst of the desolation, it shined with its own power, a warm, fearless light all its own challenging his own aura of darkness.  
  
Duo had to destroy it. It was his mission. It was all so familiar, though he couldn't figure out why. The church seemed to hold a power over him. He couldn't do anything to harm it -- he wanted to protect it. Why?  
  
Then he saw it.   
  
His eyes widened at the revelation which churned his stomach and sent a chill rippling up his spine. He was suddenly drenched in sweat, suffocating within the confines of the cramped cockpit. Over the large double doorway that beckoned him inside was written two words: Maxwell Church. And he had to destroy it. But he couldn't.  
  
*you can do it* a voice said to him from nowhere. *they're dead now. you can destroy it*  
  
It sounded so much like someone he'd known once that he believed it. Trusted it. It was a different church...this was only a simulation...he could do it. It was for the mission, and it wasn't real anyway.   
  
The young boy raised the glowing scythe held in the hands of his dark machine, preparing to slice apart the only home he could remember having. But he couldn't help but feel he was betraying the only ones who'd cared for him. Professor G would have his head for this if he knew of the thoughts Duo's jumbled mind was forming. Second guessing one's instructor was unneeded, indeed deadly, on the battlefield. There was no other choice. He had to do it.   
  
Duo halfheartedly swung the scythe. It stopped in midair, mere feet from the side of the building.   
  
The doors of Maxwell Church had opened, and under the stone arches stood three people who should have been dead. An older man, going bald, with a rosary around his neck, stood beside a young woman in a black habit. Both stood slightly behind a young boy. Their hands were placed on his shoulders, and all three stared up at the huge monster about to take all they had left.   
  
They seemed to gaze through the mecha and straight into the cockpit. They were looking directly into his eyes somehow.   
  
Duo froze. How could they be alive? They were simulations, and yet they were so real. And how could Professor G know about them? This was no ordinary simulation, and it scared him. His mission was to destroy the church.   
  
But these three. What of them? The young pilot stared helplessly at the three solitary figures who had once been so close to him, and still remained his closest family in memory. If he destroyed the church, he'd kill these three. He would be betraying them and himself; he'd be wiping out everything he had ever loved for a mission.  
  
A mission. Surely it wasn't that important.  
  
The boy was too young.  
  
He began to lose his hold on reality as memories plagued him. The first time his hair had been braided by the woman after running from her and the silver glint of scissors in the light of the windows...stealing on the streets with the boy, living day to day, playing with the other war orphans...voices, places he'd been with each of them. Little things they used to do together and apart filled his mind, springing from the dark recesses and corners into the foreground. Father Maxwell always used to close his eyes when searching for an answer to a question that was hard to explain. Was he praying? the boy had wondered once. Solo had saved his life many times, even rescuing him from the death grip of a shop owner they'd stolen food from. He was the only one who was caught, and yet Solo had promised never to leave him to the alliance police. Sister Helen brushing and braiding his hair one evening, then rocking him to sleep while he cried. He couldn't even remember what had happened, but it had seemed like the end of the world at the time, and only she could rescue him from it. These memories and more came in wave after mental wave, drenching his mind the way his sweat drenched his body. Both left him cold and fearful. Could he really be expected to do this?  
  
He shut off the scythe. The metal rod with the green crooked light that gave his gundam its name lowered, and the band of energy straightened and retreated back into its metal tomb. He couldn't do it. He couldn't kill them, and he wouldn't let them die. They were alive again in his mind. Maybe they hadn't really died after all. It was all a set up. After all, if they could exist in sims when no one else knew about them, then couldn't they really be alive? Maybe this wasn't a sim. They were real. Alive. Maybe they could all be together again, the alliance had become peaceful instead of militaristic. Maybe this gundam wasn't needed. And maybe...they could all go back home. And it would be just like old times again. Maybe....  
  
Then Solo sneered at him. His gaze was cold and hateful, and it bore into Duo's eyes and crashed its way into the recesses of his soul, damaging all thoughts and feelings in its wake, angry at him for being a coward. Solo hated him. It made the braided boy despise himself for failing in his best friend's eyes. Yet again, he'd let them down. He had wasted his second chance.  
  
The entire church, which had at first glowed with its own light, dimmed, then turned dark. The aura of warmth, love, and happiness had changed to one of cold, dark despair. The three figures standing at the church doorway blurred and began to run together, colors fading, coiling, twisting into one another in three cone shaped tornadoes. The three wound themselves together, converging into a single multicolored mass. All color faded to black. The twisted darkness moved and writhed in the doorway, eventually forming a black hooded figure with a bloodstained silver sickle. The creature stood at the doorway of the church of God. It was His church. And He was Death.  
  
Death laughed at him, bringing his head up to stare into Duo's eyes with his own: pools of bottomless black, set off by the white of his skull. The black holes were reaching out for Duo, and he was pulled under into the depths of their sea of emptiness. He was going to drown in the black space. He was breathing heavily, and air couldn't reach his lungs despite constant gasps for breath. He was in space with no suit on, and he was going to die. Death was going to take his soul.  
  
Death laughed again, lifting the side of his robe with the rod carrying his scythe. From the black folds emerged Solo, his face pale and greenish, dead. His limp body fell to the ground at Death's feet, and after him the bodies of Father Maxwell and Sister Helen. All were dead, their eyes open, staring at him even in death.   
  
"No," the young pilot choked, his body beginning to shake. His vision blurred and his eyes closed, cheeks beginning to channel tears that wouldn't stop falling. He couldn't look at the scene before him. It was too real. It was real. He didn't want to see them die. Not again.  
  
A the warm, familiar voice rose in pitch and became new. It was now a cold voice, which echoed through his mind like nails on a chalkboard. *Everything you touch, everyone you care for...I, Shinigami, will take,* it whispered. It was the same voice. It spoke the truth. And Duo believed it.   
  
He just wouldn't accept it.   
  
The boy screamed at death, the cry of a wounded, enraged animal escaping from his throat and echoing through the cockpit and the broken, flaming city. The glowing scythe appeared once more at the end of the mechas gundanium rod. It sliced through the church, stopping midway to rest in Death's midsection, before continuing straight through, hurling the top half of the church far into the distance with the power of Duo's swing and his feelings of rage and confusion. He couldn't think straight, couldn't think at all. Reality was more twisted than the broken cables and wires he had reduced the church to. More twisted than the mysterious ways of the merciful God Father Maxwell often spoke of.   
  
Unconsciously, the boy reached up to his neck to feel comforting presence of his crucifix. It wasn't there. The boy's eyes widened in panic. His only link to reality was gone. Where was it? His eyes darted around the cockpit, trying to locate his material symbol of the past.  
  
*Why do you wear a cross, boy, when it's merely a symbol of a faith you've rejected? You once said you didn't believe in any god but the God of Death because death was all you saw. Do you remember that, my son?*  
  
"LEAVE ME ALONE!" cried the boy, feeling more and more helpless with every word spoken to him through the mouth of bone shrouded in black. "And DON'T CALL ME YOUR SON!!!" Death should have been dead, or charred, at the very least. Indeed, he'd been sliced straight through. But no.  
  
Death laughed at him again, his mad cackling echoing in Duo's mind long after his form disappeared. The change seemed to happen in reverse. Father Maxwell, Sister Helen, and Solo were sucked back into Deaths robes. Death then became a formless dark mass, then seemed to transform into vines of color, which separated to reveal Father Maxwell, Sister Helen, and Solo, just as they had been before. But...no. Death appeared behind them. And they were not the same. They were no longer dead, but dying. They had been cut apart by the scythe. _His_ scythe. They fell to the ground, Solo rolling down a few steps before reaching his final resting place, head leaning precariously over the edge of a broken stone step.  
  
Duo could hear them. Their last words had changed. No longer were they kind or reassuring. Instead, "Traitor," "I trusted you...Shinigami," and "How could you?" echoed through his ears and mind, numbing him and taking their places beside his first memories of their deaths. He had betrayed them. He'd destroyed their home. He'd destroyed their lives. He'd destroyed their faith and trust in him. He was a bastard in the most literal sense of the word. And it was all his fault.  
  
The church exploded in a blinding flash of light, shaking the solitary pilot from his reverie and the numb that had overtaken him. From out of the ashes and smoldering debris of the once beautiful church rose Shinigami, his dark robe billowing in the gray smoke, his black, skeletal wings carrying him through the air until he was level with the Deathscythe hatch. The boy inside shivered. It was getting colder, yet he was still sweating. His teeth began to chatter.  
  
*You traitor,* mocked Death. *Yes, how could you? You were right, Duo. I shouldn't call you my son. I shouldn't, because you and I are one and the same, Duo. _We_ are Shinigami. You can't escape your destiny, Maxwell, any more than you can escape Death. You can't escape Death, Duo. Because you can't escape yourself.*  
  
"No," he whispered from the cockpit, fear seizing his heart and squeezing his chest. He was short of breath again. What was happening?   
  
Death cackled evilly at his reaction to the truth about himself. *Did you ever wonder, boy, why it was that everything you touched with love died? Ash to ash, dust to dust. You are the wind that snuffs out life. You and I, we are the fire that reduces people to ash and dust. We are Shinigami. We are one.*  
  
The Deathscythe's hatch began to open. In a panicked, last ditch effort to save himself, the braided pilot slammed down on the button to shut the hatch. The door shut, but from cracks around the edge seeped a dark mist. The horrified boy then tried to open it, but the words 'System Malfunction' flashed across his screen. There was no escape. The mist entered the cockpit and settled over Duo's body, now quivering with the fear of realization, as Death's words finally registered in his mind. *We are one, Shinigami.*  
  
And it was truth. All Duo could do was scream in pain and despair as Death sat in his seat and entered his body, becoming one with the sobbing boy whose soul cried out for help that would never come.  
  
Duo passed out. The simulation ended.  
  
~*~*~*~*~  
  
The next day, Duo woke up and bounced happily into the mess hall for his breakfast before beginning the day's training. He even gave a playful salute to the cook before turning on his heels and grabbing a tray, his braid whipping around in the space behind him as he sat at a table in the corner of the room and proceeded to eat just as much as the mechanics, the youngest of which was 10 years his senior. He ate a lot for a single boy, especially one so thin as he was. It wasn't that he was starving -- he was well fed. But food always seemed to hold a mystery to him, and he always ate as if each meal was his last.  
  
  
As the day's simulation training began, Professor G noted with disapproval that the crucifix still hung around the boy's neck. Inside his cockpit, he was giving war whoops, and seemed to enjoy the destruction and havoc he caused among his simulated victims and targets. So far, that, and the occasional times he referred to himself as the "God of Death," were the only noted successes of his secret training the night before.  
  
"Maurice," Professor G whispered urgently later on in a back hallway when the two seemed to be alone, "what does he think happened last night?"  
  
"He thinks it was a dream, sir. It was a complete success."  
  
"Good, good," replied the professor. The secret simulations they had been putting the boy through lately seemed to be working. They made sure he woke up in his bed the next morning with no memory of the simulations being real. They toyed with his grip on reality, making him unsure sometimes of what was real, what was memory, and what was simply nightmare. They made sure each simulation training session was stored in his mind as the correct one of the three. He had believed his meeting with death was a nightmare based on memory. He believed he was Shinigami, or at least an extension of him. Hopefully, now the boy would remain as friendly and chipper as he'd always been, but never get too close for fear of hurting those he cared for. It was necessary for him to blend in with the people of earth, yet keep his mission from being jeopardized or discovered. Superficial relationships could be useful. Anything deeper could mean failure.  
  
The other goal of that particular sim was that when he killed, he would believe himself to be the God of Death. The guilt would vanish because he was only doing his job: he was freeing their souls.  
  
Professor G allowed a rare smile to tug at the corners of his mouth. Duo was right on schedule. Tonight's secret simulation training should go on without a hitch. If a boy can believe he is the God of Death, well...he can believe anything. I'll mold him into the perfect war machine, thought the mop-topped scientist. The professor shook his head in amusement. "Children are so impressionable." 


End file.
